Over the course of the last two issues, there’s been a very interesting discussion in this newsletter about productivity. It’s seen me agree heartily with one of my guest contributors, and disagree heartlessly with another (I hope he’s forgiven me – I haven’t heard from him in a while).
At first blush, one would think that a discussion around productivity would be pretty simple. One might expect a good commentator or writer to provide some helpful tips, tools and hacks, thereby helping the average in-house lawyer to attain a more consistently high level of work output.
Job done!
Job not done – as it transpires.
Last week’s Guest GC Expert, Navneet Hrishikesan, wrote a powerful piece arguing that productivity per se isn’t the ‘be-all-and end-all’. In his words, productivity isn’t all that it is cracked up to be. A strange conclusion, you might think, from one of India’s top GCs, who one imagines is pretty productive, and runs a productive team. But a conclusion with which I very much agreed (if you want to know why, you’ll have to look back at last week’s issue).
This week’s correspondent, Consuela from South America1, takes the discussion in a slightly different direction. She tells us a bit about her particular personality preferences, and asks me for some practical advice about how to attain greater productivity given those preferences.
Thanks for that, Consuela – I love a correspondent who reminds me that the name of this newsletter (and I’m the guy who named it, after all) is Practical Counsel. Sometimes I can be a bit conceptual, I know. People have given me that feedback – and I take it on the chin (after all, I’m also the guy who advocates for a good feedback loop – and so I have to swallow my own medicine, don’t I).
So, without disagreeing with a word that Navneet wrote last week, I am following my correspondent’s lead (and express request) and sharing my practical thoughts about how she might become more productive. But being me, before you get to the practical, there’s some more conceptual stuff to read through.
You may groan. But believe me, I wouldn’t include it if I didn’t think it was helpful and ultimately useful to you, I really wouldn’t.
And this week, in place of a Guest GC Expert, we have a subject matter expert from the field of neuroscience and neurodiversity. She writes an interesting short piece on what neurodiversity really is and why it is so important. I introduce and frame her piece in my comment below. It genuinely (to flip the words of the song) isn’t all about the Bass, about the Bass2 … you and your colleagues are, to extend the metaphor, a mixture of voices; and a legal department that only has Basses isn’t going to be either very diverse, or very effective. You need not just Basses, but Altos, Sopranos and Tenors too … and different tones of voice, all hopefully singing in glorious harmony.
But enough of the strained metaphor, and on with the newsletter.
Enjoy reading, and please comment and contribute to the debate by posting direct on Practical Counsel. Also, please write in with your unique people issues to me (practicalcounsel@substack.com) - I unequivocally undertake never to reveal your identity and will change key details of your situation so as to preserve your confidentiality and anonymity (unless you don’t want this). I also undertake to write to you personally with my own thoughts and comments on your situation and am always happy to follow up with a call on Zoom or similar.
‘Dear Jonathan’ - and Jonathan’s Reply
Dear Jonathan
I read with the utmost interest Navneet Hrishikesan’s contribution to issue #9 of your newsletter last week.
I found it so interesting (and I’m sure other readers did too) that someone senior at a company like Cisco would argue that productivity isn’t necessarily the most important thing for an in-house lawyer to achieve.
While I understand the logic behind Navneet’s comment (and agree that providing strategic value to the business is key), I am interested in what you wrote about in the previous issue (issue #8) about different techniques for achieving productivity being applicable to different personality types. Can you amplify on this in practical terms in your commentary this week?
By way of background, I have often wondered whether I am really cut out to be a lawyer. Although I happen to absolutely love what I do.
Let me expand.
I am far from organised.
People look at my desk and wonder how I manage to get through part of my work, let alone all of it (I am DGC, Disputes, of a multi-national, based in South America[1]). I, for my part, marvel at lawyers like your previous correspondent, Jeffrey, who not only have everything organised on an excel spreadsheet, but who also actually refer to that spreadsheet when working through whatever their tasks are. Mind blowing! But that just isn’t me.
I’ve always done well at my job and usually receive excellent feedback when it comes to my annual appraisal. I somehow manage to get through all of my work. But I am always bumping up against deadlines, and struggling to manage the competing demands on my time.
In terms of email management I’m not great at managing the massive flow of emails that hit me every day. I don’t always reply to certain email messages, because they get lost in the deluge that is my daily inbox.
In terms of decision-making, rapid decision-making doesn’t come easily to me. I love the journey of working out the answer, as much as nailing the solution and just moving on.
And yes, I’m a massive people person. I love interacting with my colleagues both in legal and in the business. And sometimes I get sidetracked, and pulled easily off task.
Any thoughts? And any practical suggestions.
Best wishes
Consuela (she/her)
Jonathan’s View
Dear Consuela
Thanks so much for writing to me. I really appreciate it.
I’m going to discuss the so-called ‘typology of personality’ in future issues of Practical Counsel. I’ll be providing an overview of various models of personality (and personality type) and chatting about those models in some depth, I’m sure.
So the typology of personality and personality difference is a massive topic for future issues of Practical Counsel. I think understanding one’s own personality and the personality of others is key to being a highly effective manager and leader.
I think I can nonetheless say something helpful here in relation to your particular circumstances and personality type in advance of having given a full overview of personality type theory.
In terms of one of the key dimensions of personality3 it sounds like you are someone who favours ‘emergence’ over ‘closure’. That probably sounds completely impenetrable to you - and is almost certainly incomprehensible without further explanation - so let me explain what I mean.
According to one of the best-known models of personality type4, one of the key dimensions of personality is whether, as individuals, we need or crave structure and stability in our lives, or whether we are comfortable with a relatively high degree (or a very high degree) of uncertainty and lack of structure.
Those who are uncomfortable with a lack of structure, and who crave certainty, sometimes find it bizarre that anyone could desire the opposite. One explanation given by psychologists for why people desire the opposite is that those people are reluctant to shut down options and want to leave themselves open to new possibilities. Structure and certainty imply and require closure and ‘perceiving’ types5 want to leave their options open, so too much structure and too much certainty is, for them, an unwelcome constraint.
Psychologists would further say that we need people with both types of personality preference (on this particular dimension of personality) within a well-rounded team. Indeed it can be helpful for an individual both, at times, to crave certainty and to shut down options, and at times to leave options open.
Let me give you a practical example. If you are a disputes lawyer, it isn’t always desirable to close down lines of enquiry too early, or to lock down the final draft of a set of legal submissions or a legal brief or a pleading / filing in a court case. If you do so too early, you might miss something important or not be able to allow in new evidence, which might help you to win your case. I have in mind here a most brilliant disputes lawyer who I had the privilege to coach and whose brilliance, according to his colleagues, is his ability to accommodate new information and to flex rapidly to the Judge’s line of enquiry.
This disputes lawyer is utterly chaotic, his desk is a shambles, and according to his colleagues he can be quite exasperating to work with at times, because nothing is ever set in stone until the very last minute. And even then, not completely set in stone. But according to his colleagues it is precisely these abilities that mean he wins the vast majority of his cases, is absolutely beloved of clients (and colleagues he mentors) and able to command an extraordinarily high charge out rate.
I’m giving an example from private practice, but I’m sure you get the point.
In coaching this individual, I had to get him to a place where he didn’t miss every internal event within his firm, didn’t constantly miss deadlines for responding to internal managerial issues, and didn’t drive his colleagues to such distraction that they left the firm. This particular individual needed to round out his skills by injecting a measure of certainty into his life. The challenge as a coach was how to help him to do so, given the hard-wiring of his personality towards emergence and non-closure.
I hope you’ve understood what I mean by emergence and non-closure, now, and it doesn’t just sound like psychobabble any longer.
I can’t know you well enough from the brief self-portrait in your charming e-mail to have a rounded sense of your personality type.
But your self-description reminds me of several senior lawyers I have coached in-house and one in particular. Chad was DGC of a US corporate, a consummate people person, utterly charming and regularly dropping balls or struggling to avoid doing so.
I saw in Chad a brilliance that I think others of his colleagues might have overlooked. They just saw some of the chaos and didn’t see the positive aspects that were so likely to be conducive to success if this individual could conquer some of the less positive aspects of his style. Those positive aspects were creativity, an ability to see the big picture, a flexibility of mind-set which made him a potentially great DGC of Corporate – and potentially a star GC in due course.
Chad made huge progress and managed to conquer some of the challenges he needed to deal with in terms of his self-development, without losing his ‘secret sauce’. He got there because he had a growth mindset, was willing to learn, and worked hard at what we discussed.
Here are a few practical things that might work for you6 Consuela:
· Don’t worry too much about filing all of your emails into folders. That works for some people, but it’s highly unlikely to work for you. Let’s be realistic.
· Think instead about flagging emails that you’ve read but can’t yet action. Even better if you can flag them with different colours according to priority or type. But let’s not get overengineered here. The key is to find easy solutions that work for you and your naturally unstructured personality type.
· If you’ve part read an email but not fully read it, go back and mark it as unread. Have the discipline to do this tiny thing. It will make a big difference and you’re much less likely to miss important information that you’ve not read. And thereby a lot less likely to irritate colleagues in Legal and folks in the business.
· Periodically (ideally every day) scan back through your recent flagged emails to check if there’s anything that requires immediate or near immediate action. And action this.
· Have someone in your team set up calendar reminders or ‘ticklers’ for important events. If you don’t have that support, set these up yourself. Be realistic if you’re unlikely to look at the excel project plan and, instead, set up something you’re actually going to look at and therefore likely to action. And even you, Consuela, are going to look at your Outlook calendar every day, several times a day. So use your Outlook calendar as your primary time management tool.
· Don’t worry too much about having a super clear desk. You’ve found a way of working through the chaos. But don’t let it get to a point where even you can’t find what you need. Every so often have a bit of a clear out and put a few things away – or get someone to help you to organise yourself a bit.
· Similarly every so often close down a few of the 54 windows you have open on your desktop or laptop and check as you do so that there isn’t some half-finished draft email that you really should have finished, or something else that you haven’t yet completed. Don’t beat yourself up as you do this – on your account you very rarely drop any balls; you’re just trying here to make life a bit easier for yourself, and for others.
My point here is not to try to solve for you. You’ve got a zillion and one things going on in your professional and personal life, and only you can truly solve for your personal situation.
The best I can do for you, and for my other readers, is to try to provide you with some frameworks for seeing your challenges somewhat differently, and with some tools for you to make the changes you need to make, that work for the unique human being that is you.
I wish you all the best of luck meeting those challenges. Remember that your people powers are not common to all lawyers and that one person’s chaos is another person’s harnessed creativity. I am sure that you, like Chad, will be a star if you figure out how to leverage your strengths, manage your blind spots and develop or find work arounds for things you’re not currently so good at.
Below you’ll read a slightly different perspective, Consuela, which I think you’ll also find interesting.
I’ve approached your stated challenge from the perspective of personality type.
Our Subject Matter Expert Contributor this week, Dominique Ashby, has a background in neuroscience and she analyses these issues more from the perspective of the relevant neuroscience. She writes below about neurodiversity and its importance.
Dominique’s expertly crafted piece speaks for itself. All I’d say is that there is no ‘right’ way of analysing and solving challenges like the ones you’ve shared with me. Different insights from different areas of science such as psychology and neuroscience can all help inform practical solutions, as I hope I’ve illustrated above, and hope to continue to do in future issues of this publication.
As always, I encourage members of the Practical Counsel community to write in to me at practicalcounsel@substack.com with your people problems and issues that are currently concerning you, or that come up for you regularly. And, as always, I will anonymise your observations / issues and preserve confidentiality and write to you individually in response to any scenario that I use in this newsletter.
Best wishes
Jonathan
Input from a Subject Matter Expert: Neurodiversity – what is it and why is it important
Dominique Ashby is a Masters graduate of Cambridge University in Neuroscience. She is the founder of neuro@work, a specialist consultancy bringing insights and learnings from neuroscience to the workplace – and providing practical advice to businesses as to how to apply those insights and learnings operationally at work. She specialises in helping organisations to implement complex change and to realise D & I strategies.
Dear Jonathan
You’ve asked me to provide an overview of what is meant by neurodiversity and why I believe that it is important in any workplace. This applies equally to in-house legal departments (and law firms) – I know this as I have practical experience of both.
I enjoyed Issue #8 of Practical Counsel and Jeffrey Pomeranz’s insights into improving productivity – I found his tips practical and very effective. There are a number of activity types that can naturally switch our brain into a more productive state with the ideal chemical composition for our brain to function at its best. We can touch on those in future issues of your publication as they are powerful activities to accelerate change and transformation. However, today, I would like to offer a perspective on productivity through the lens of neurodiversity, as a complement to the more traditional personality-type lens.
What are the origins of neurodiversity?
Neurodiversity is a term that was first used by Judy Singer, a sociologist who has autism, in the late 1990s. For those who are unfamiliar with what neurodiverse means here is a very brief explanation: The majority of people are neurotypical - their brains function and process information in a way that is common and expected by what the clinical world has classed as a “typical” brain. However, there are also many of us that have brains that work outside, and beyond, the standard programming. These are people who process information differently to what is classed as neurotypical, allowing them to experience and interact with the world in a different way. Autism, Dyslexia, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Dyspraxia are perhaps the most associated with the term neurodiverse.
It is important to note that the concept of neurodiversity is not clinical. It is a term used to champion the view that there is no one right or wrong way of thinking or behaving and that our cognitive differences are a positive to be celebrated, rather than badged as a deficiency.
Inclusive workplace design is a key to productivity
From our experiences of working remotely through various lockdowns, we already know that what makes a productive working day and productive working environment for one person does not necessarily make a productive environment for another. This lived wisdom, that we now all have in our recent memories, also tracks through to the topic of neurodiversity.
There are many, too many, experiences shared by neurodiverse people of having to work in environments not inclusive of their individual needs. When this is the case, this can force the brain into its “safe mode” – also known as fight-or-flight. A side effect of our brain’s safe mode is that our brain drains its energy reserves far more quickly, as well as inhibiting areas of the brain involved in emotional regulation and executive thinking. All this has a direct, negative effect on productivity. (And on a side note, organisational change pushes neurotypical brains into fight-or-flight as well, generating feelings of low energy, discomfort and low productivity – this is why integrating neuroscience tools into change programmes is so important for everyone, no matter what their neurotype).
The approach of supporting every employee with a workplace assessment when they join a team is a key way to identify and support individual neurodiverse workplace needs. By way of example, adjusting ambient light and sound levels, as well as providing “sensory pause” rooms that relieve the brain from sensory overload, often works to support people with forms of autism and allow them to perform at their best at work.
Designing a truly inclusive workplace for all neurotypes produces real benefits for business. The executive director and head of Autism at Work at JPMorgan Chase has been quoted as saying that “Our autistic employees achieve, on average, 48% to 140% more work than their typical colleagues, depending on the roles.” SAP reports to have a 90% retention rate of hires on the autism spectrum because it creates a system of support around those employees through its Autism at Work program. Both impressive statistics with direct impact on a business’s bottom line.
Incidentally, last week was ‘Neurodiversity Celebration Week’ and I can recommend www.neurodiversityinlaw.co.uk to anyone interested in learning more. I can only hope that the legal industry of tomorrow can realise the full potential of everyone interested in contributing to its success.
I look forward to writing more about these matters in future issues of Practical Counsel.
Best wishes
Dominique
This week’s key takeaways
1. Issues around productivity are more complicated than they might at first appear.
2. One-size-fits-all productivity solutions might be great in theory, but they don’t work in practice.
3. Understanding your personality type and personality preferences well can help you to develop solutions to your productivity issues that actually work for you, rather than for ‘EveryLawyer’.
4. Although there are definitely typical types of lawyer, ‘EveryLawyer’ doesn’t exist any more than ‘Everyman’ or ‘Everywoman’ does. Human beings are more complex than that.
5. Remember that the flip side / bright side of your work challenges is very often your strengths – or can inform what are your potential key strengths.
6. For example the flip side of not always ticking things off the list and not always being the linear ‘executor’ of work is often creativity and innovation. Steady state work planners and executors are often not the creative or innovative members of work teams.
7. Neuroscience and neurodiversity provides an alternative lens through which to look at some key workplace issues.
8. Learnings from neuroscience can inform the best ways of approaching certain things at work, including leading and managing change, as well as managing neurodiverse colleagues.
And now …
Contribute to the debate and write in with your comments and observations. Also write to Jonathan with any other people issues you face as an in-house lawyer.
Jonathan can be reached by email at practicalcounsel@substack.com
A note for you picky lawyers; and a plea for tolerance
I am a British lawyer by background and went to both school and University in the UK. So my English is British English. I have taken a conscious decision to write this newsletter in British English, but to try to avoid phrases that aren’t common outside the UK. Sometimes, though, I’ll use a phrase that isn’t commonly used outside the UK, without realising that it is a Britishism. I also endeavour to use the vernacular spellings of my contributors (e.g. to use US spellings for a US contributor), but won’t always get this right.
My plea is for you to tolerate the British spellings and grammar and the occasional Britishism. And to focus on the substance of the newsletter rather than the occasional (to you) annoying turn of phrase, bit of grammar or unorthodox spelling, or the occasional inconsistency in spelling as between, for example, UK and US ‘standard’ spellings.
Thank you and best wishes,
Jonathan Middleburgh
Strategic Partners
Editor’s Note – Consuela’s English is excellent. But certain of her words have been amended in the process of anonymising and editing her email. And her real name is not Consuela, as names and key facts are always altered to preserve anonymity and confidentiality.
All About That Bass by Meghan Trainor. Wildly popular, but, for the avoidance of doubt, I’m not encouraging you to read the lyrics. Written by Meghan Trainor – trigger warning; the language isn’t to everyone’s taste.
The dimension of personality I am referencing here is the so-called judging / perceiving dimension of personality, in the well-known Myers Briggs model of personality. While some academics have, rightly in my view, questioned aspects of the validity of the Myers Briggs model, it nonetheless is a helpful and insightful partial model of personality type, which has also influenced other perhaps more complete models, such as the Lumina model of personality which is newer and less well-known.
See Note 3.
The language of ‘perceiving’ is from the Myers Briggs model, which is itself based on Carl Jung’s typology of personality. It isn’t a particularly helpful descriptive label of the underlying concept. The Lumina personality model has the label ‘People Focused’ for what is essentially the same concept. That label doesn’t seem to me to quite capture the underlying concept either. But this is probably because the concept is quite a complex one and requires unpacking, as I’m endeavouring to do here.
These are just a few suggestions. I’d need to know you a lot better, Consuela, to offer some more personal practical suggestions.